


thiriódis

by jediseagull



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Gen, Horror, Monsters, Tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-26
Updated: 2016-10-26
Packaged: 2018-08-27 02:51:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8384377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jediseagull/pseuds/jediseagull
Summary: There's a monster in the mailbox.





	

The mailbox keeps eating Conor’s letters.

He…doesn’t mean that metaphorically.

Nobody else ever seems to use the graffitied blue box he passes on his morning runs, probably because it’s stupidly out of the way. The only reason he knows it’s there is because he tries to avoid the really popular jogging routes - Pittsburgh isn’t a big town, and not to toot his own horn or anything, but Conor’s a _Stanley Cup Champion_.

He has to do a little shimmy at the thought, even now at the start of a new season. That’s just how his brain works. Conor’s small, but he’s persistent. He doesn’t let things go. It got him to Sid’s line, and to the Cup final, and it means that once he’s got something in his head he’s going to work at it until it makes sense.

Which is what makes the mailbox so frustrating. He’d run by it for weeks before he’d even realized something was strange; it’s not like he’s got tons of shit to post, or anything. But in April, he’d tried to send a signed poster of Sid to one of his baby cousins for her birthday. He’d taken the envelope with him, dropped it off - and instead of the sound of cardstock hitting metal or paper, there’d been a liquid, suctioning _gloop_.

And then: silence.

He’d looked around, but there was no kid splashing through mud puddles, no explanation for that odd noise. He resigned himself to asking Sid to sign a new poster - this one would probably show up totally ruined if there was enough water in the bottom of the mailbox to make that sound.

Only the poster had never arrived at all. He’d had to get another one overnighted through FedEx.

And that was weird enough that the next time he’d gone for a run, he’d brought another letter, just a short note he’d dashed off to his mom on the back of a postcard from the Pittsburgh Zoo.

The _gloop_ was quieter that time, the postcard less substantial than the heavy envelope he’d used for Maddie’s present, but even if Conor hadn’t been listening for it - it wasn’t the sound of paper falling onto water. Besides, it hadn’t rained in days.

The letter never made it to its destination either, and then it was playoffs and Conor had other things at the forefront of his mind, playoffs and the compounding aches and pains of one, two, three brutal series, and then the final - and the Cup, after, the parade and champagne and parties where he was too intoxicated to think about anything beyond this dizzying new reality.

He’d gone home for the summer before he’d ever really sobered up, did his summer training and took a few well-earned vacations.

Now he’s back in Pittsburgh, and the mailbox is still _gloop_ -ing when he drops things in it - leaves, pebbles, a gum wrapper. Conor doesn’t think he’s imagining the faint smell of decay that’s started to waft from the dark opening of the mail slot.

It is, objectively, kind of unsettling.

When he calls the post office, asking if they can check if there’s an animal or something decomposing in there, the woman on the phone says there’s no box at that location.

“Are you sure?” Conor says, and, “Can you check again?”

But the woman reassures him that yes, she’s sure, and the post office removes any defunct mail boxes if one goes out of service.

“Okay,” he tells her, though it’s really not okay at all. “Sorry to bother you.”

Training camp is underway, guys coming back from the World Cup in ones and twos to join in. Bones starts a slow clap for Phil when he hits the ice the morning after Team USA is eliminated; the doctors tell Muzz his hand is broken and he takes the news with the same unflappable composure that let him face down an Ovechkin slapper. Conor’s doing all the right things, working hard on and off the ice because he would never, not in a million years, let some X-Files shit sabotage his hockey, but - he’s gotta know.

“Weird question.”

Dana looks up from where he’s rearranging a stack of skate blades. “Hey, Conor. What can I do for you?”

“Do you have, like,” Conor starts, except there’s no good way to phrase _something that will let me break into an abandoned mailbox._ Dana’s incredibly chill in the face of the chaos that is a professional hockey team, but nobody’s _that_ chill.

“Never mind,” he says, and scuttles off.

After skate, he rounds up his Wilkes-Barre boys instead. Someone has to have picked up a trick or two in juniors. Rusty’s out with his “broken finger”, but the rest of his boys allow themselves to be wrangled pretty easily - Knuckles and Willie and even Muzz, who’s been his usual solid, quiet presence around the room as the trainers put him through some hands-free yoga or whatever else goalies do.

They end up at a local café that’s serving pumpkin pasta for the fall. Once they’ve established that Conor’s paying - “Seriously?” he asks, and Willie shrugs. “Hey, man, free food is free food.” - Muzz leans back against the booth and says, “Okay, what’s up?”

“Do any of you know how to pick locks?” Conor blurts out.

Willie chokes on a sip of water; Knuckles says, “What?” like he does whenever they make a reference to an obscure bit of 90s pop culture. Muzz just blinks at him.

Conor explains. At the end, when he’s said his piece, Willie says, “You know that sounds absolutely fucking _insane_ , right?”

He nods miserably.

“Why don’t you just find a different running route?” Muzz asks sensibly.

“No,” Conor says, because he can’t. In theory, sure, but - he’d go back. He knows he’d go back.

The three of them trade glances, and then Knuckles leans forward and says, “Okay. We want to see it.”

They take Conor’s car, because you can’t actually find the place on Google Maps. He’d tried, when he was explaining to the post office lady where she was supposed to be looking. It’s technically in a park or something, Conor thinks, so there’s no street address. He’s never driven the one-lane road winding past row after row of tidy suburban homes that get more sparse with each block, but he’s familiar with the high school football field that melts into an open expanse of grass until it hits a dense layer of trees. The grass is fenced off, delineating school property from the surrounding woods; like the grass, the sidewalk dies at the fence line.

And there, at the end of the concrete where the first trees start to grow, is the mailbox.

Conor pulls off onto the shoulder, gravel crunching under the tires as the car rolls to a stop. Knuckles and Willie shove each other as they jostle for space in the back. All four of them look at it through the windows.

“This is stupid,” Willie says. He sounds like he’s trying to play it off as no big deal, but they’d all grown quieter and quieter as the drive had gone on. Nobody had spoken at all for the last two miles.

“You’re stupid,” Knuckles says.

Conor’s not sure if the nervousness in the pit of his stomach is from the tension in the car, or from the thought that maybe he’s been imagining things this whole time. “You’re both stupid, Jesus. Come on.”

“Oh, and what, Muzz gets off totally free?” Willie grumbles as he clambers out.

“Goalie,” Knuckles and Conor say in unison. Muzz’s smug grin is a mirror image of Flower’s whenever he stones them in shootout practice.

“Okay, that’s creepy,” Conor tells him. “Knock that shit off.”

They cross the street and then, while the others watch, he hooks one finger around the metal handle of the mail slot and pulls it open.

“Oh God,” Knuckles says, and gags. “Fuck, that’s disgusting.”

The air _reeks_. It’s like the time there’d been a dead rat in the locker room back at Cushing and nobody had figured out where it was for three whole days - only worse, somehow, rot and mold overlaid with this briny smell that reminds Conor of the ocean. The stench hits him in the face and makes him cough, eyes watering.

“Here,” Willie says, tossing him a piece of gravel with one hand while he holds his nose with the other.

Conor drops it into the tray and lets go. The metal slams shut. The pebble falls.

 _Gloop_.

“Okay,” Knuckles says, strangled like he’s trying not to breathe any more than he has to. “I believe you. Can we -” He jerks his head back towards the car.

The smell isn’t as bad across the street, though it lingers in Conor’s nose.

“We should call the police,” Willie says. He looks grossed out, a little wide-eyed. They all do, even Muzz.

“And say what?” Conor demands. “I tried calling the post office, and they didn’t even believe this thing exists.”

“Dude, I think you fucking found like, a corpse in a mailbox,” Willie insists. “This is way out of our league.”

“It’s probably just a raccoon or squirrel or something,” Muzz says, but Conor shakes his head.

“I’ve thrown some pretty heavy stuff in there. I’ve never heard anything hit the bottom. If we could open it up and check -”

“This is such a bad idea,” Willie says.

Muzz hmms and goes back around to the other side of the car. When he returns, he’s got a puck and a long, flat piece of cloth - no, not cloth, Conor realizes. One of those rubber resistance bands the trainers have them use for stretching.

“If there’s a human body’s worth of corpse goo in there,” he says, “We call the cops.”

Knuckles laughs, shakily. “Are you serious?”

Muzz looks at Conor. “You gonna leave this alone?” Conor shakes his head again, and knots the band around the puck like a fishing lure when Muzz passes it to him.

“Jesus Christ,” Knuckles sighs, but he and Willie come with them as they approach the mailbox. Muzz drops the puck in, and Conor tilts it closed just enough that it slides off the tray. The band stretches, and there’s an ominous sucking sound as the puck impacts with whatever’s down there.

Muzz brings the end of the band closer, and then closer again, and when the fingertips of his unbroken hand are nearly inside the mailbox he looks at Conor and says, tone strange, “It’s not going slack.”

Conor can’t get enough air.

“What do you mean?” Knuckles calls.

“The band is long enough that the puck should have reached the bottom by now,” Muzz says, raising his voice so the other two can hear. “Even if there was, you know, corpse goo. It’s not.”

“Pull it back,” Conor says. “Pull it back, _now_.”

Muzz yanks hard on the band, and - nothing. The band stretches so thin it looks gray, but it doesn’t move.

“Just let it go!” Willie shouts, but Muzz is not-so-secretly as much of a stubborn bastard as the rest of them are, a kid who’s spent too many years fighting to ever really know how to give up, and he wraps another loop around his hand and puts his back into it.

“Jesus,” Knuckles says again, and then he and Willie are grabbing on too, grunting with effort as they pull - and, slowly, on the verge of snapping, the band starts to contract.

Because he’s the one holding the drop tray open, Conor is closest to the mailbox. As the band emerges inch by hard-fought inch, the smell intensifies until it’s nearly unbearable.

The next section that they pull out is covered in a viscous coating of black ooze.

“Holy shit,” Conor breathes. “Keep going.”

They do. Each step backwards reveals a building mass of that same sticky substance, thicker and thicker until it’s spilling out around the edges of the opening. Conor lets go hurriedly, but the slot stays open, black liquid dripping slowly from the elongated band to puddle in the space between his teammates and the mailbox. They’ve backed nearly all the way up to the road before there’s a gurgle, a clogged sink kind of sound that has them instinctively shielding their faces. With a final bubbling squelch, the last bit of ooze splatters out of the mailbox - the puck pops free - and they’re left looking at a pool of _something_ nearly ten feet in diameter.

It gleams like an oil slick. Toxic. Conor edges around it to join the others.

“Now can we call the cops?” Willie asks plaintively.

“How do you think that’s gonna go?” Conor says. “‘911, what’s your emergency?’ ‘Well, me and my friends found this mysterious black goo in a mailbox and now we don’t know what to do with it.’”

“Now you know why it was making that noise, though,” Muzz points out. “We could leave now.” _Before things get any weirder_ , his expression seems to say.

Knuckles and Willie both nod emphatically, and Conor fidgets. He’s starting to feel a little guilty over dragging them out all this way, and their shitty attempts to hide how freaked-out they are right now aren’t helping.

“Yeah, okay, let’s go.” He glances down at his keys and, huh, he must not have moved out of the way fast enough. A few droplets of liquid cling to the hem of his t-shirt.

Thoughtlessly, he raises his hand to brush them off.

The instant he makes contact, time stops - and then there is pain. 

His head feels like it’s splitting open under a deluge of memories that aren’t his - _it is hungry, always hungry, its gullet the size of oceans, its writhing limbs casting shadows that span continents, its appetite so insatiable that those few pathetic creatures yet living have named it Devourer, yes, and it will eat them too soon enough, consume this world as it has consumed all the others before it -_

Conor screams - 

Its mouth stays closed as it unlocks the car and slides into the driver’s seat. The reflection in the rearview belongs to it, now, fleshy and unfamiliar except for the oil-slick gleam in its black pupils. The last time it woke, there were not these mechanical transports, but it’s not concerned. It knows what he - what Conor - knew. 

It knows everything.

“Fuck,” the one called Willie says, and shivers. “I know we just ate, but I think we deserve a little junk food on Shearsy’s dime, because that was some _freaky shit_.”

“Yes,” it says, and smiles with all the teeth in its new mouth. This boy was just a morsel, there and gone too soon to even register. “In fact, I’m really quite hungry.”

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Pens Monthly October prompts: Conor Sheary, tentacles, and a blue mailbox. 
> 
> NO, I DON'T KNOW HOW I GOT HERE EITHER.


End file.
